One of the challenges in designing state of the art traffic management systems is that often the cost of the traffic management circuitry becomes a “barrier to entry”. This is especially the case for egress traffic management, which term refers to management of data packet traffic flows exiting a data communication system such as a data packet switch or router. Specifically, many traffic management schemes have a centralized egress queuing point from which traffic is scheduled. This results in traded-offs relating to cost and flexibility of future applications.
One problem is that the scale of the traffic management requirements needs to be determined ahead of time and designed into the data communication system. These requirements are often related to supporting many applications, some of which are unique to various customers. Some of the main factors in this regard are the depth of memory, the number of queuing entities, and the number of virtual output ports used for egress traffic management. Often, the cost of satisfying these requirements makes it difficult to meet low “Cost of Entry” market demands. Furthermore, if the scale of traffic management requirements has been met in the most cost-effective manner, then often there is not enough flexibility in the egress traffic management functionality to support new applications.
Accordingly, there is a need for an egress traffic management system that provides flexibility in both scale and functionality of egress traffic management in a cost-effective manner.